SYSTEMIC FUNCTIONAL ANALYSIS OF TRANSITIVITY PATTERNS IN AI AND KATE CHOPIN’S ‘THE STORY OF AN HOUR’

Abstract

The study uses the Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) transitivity analysis tool to conduct a comparative examination of Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” with AI-created versions that were generated via GPT-5 and Gemini Pro 2.5. Transitivity process types of the five 1000 word texts–(two AI-created, AI-stories and the human one) were analyzed by separating them into clauses and coding them for transitivity. Quantitative frequency counts as well as qualitative interpretations show that material processes dominated all five narratives, while the original narrative written by Chopin also had a significantly higher amount of mental and existential processes and a wider variety of marked themes than the two AI re-creations. By including themes such as contextual grounding or emotional complexity on the one hand and featuring greater amounts of marked themes on the other, the writing of Chopin established the focus on the internal, the contextualised and the emotional complexity of the character of Louise Mallard; whereas the two AI-created narratives reinforced the character of Louise Mallard as an externalised person through description and by providing dialogue versus exhibiting complex consciousness and existential framing that typified the romantic writing style of Chopin’s time. Through the SFL, differences in the systematic stylistic styles between humans and AIs can be identified, with the conclusion from this research suggesting that AI is able to be similar in form to narratives; however, they do not possess the same depth of experience found in human writers. Future research should develop a broader range of corpuses and genres in order to look at the applicability of these conclusions to a wide range of models and narrative types.